The recent WinterFest weekend in Jim Thorpe Borough once again showed the town’s tremendous appeal to visitors and owners of a local trolley company are hoping to work with the municipality and Jim Thorpe Area School District to reduce traffic congestion downtown.

Ed and Lynn Humphreys, who started Jim Thorpe Trolley Tours last year, are proposing a new venture that would see visitors park on the east side of town, either in the L.B. Morris Elementary School parking lot or the back portion of the Memorial Park parking lot and then be shuttled downtown.

“We’ve already purchased one vehicle and in order to proceed, we would need to purchase another larger vehicle to move more people,” Lynn said during a borough workshop Thursday night. “We realize once the county lot gets full downtown, the cars are streaming in at a pretty good rate with nowhere to really go and we are hoping we can help provide a solution.”

With the proposal in the early stages, neither the school district nor borough has granted permission yet for the use of those parking lots, but those discussions, Ed said, would be ongoing.

“We actually prefer using L.B. Morris as the main lot and Memorial Park as a backup because the lines are already painted over at the school and everything is ready to go,” he said.

If the borough and/or school district allow use of the lots, it would receive a portion of the profits the couple takes in from running the shuttles.

“We’re a business and of course we want to make money, but we want to share the revenue with the borough and school district as well,” Ed said.

According to Ed, the shuttles would run four times an hour with the main hang-up at this point being where the drop off point would be and where the shuttles would turn around to head back to the east side parking lots. The shuttles would primarily run Friday-Sunday.

“It’s something we could work together on,” Police Chief Joe Schatz said, “but we did take away left hand turns into the county lot on those busy weekends because of the backups it created coming from the Nesquehoning side of Route 209. We were allowing the rafting companies to turn in there when they came down on a weekend, but I don’t know if we could accommodate a bus every 15 minutes like that.”

Traffic backups were again a concern as crowds increased during February’s WinterFest.

“We have a ticket booth for our trolleys down at the train station and it’s really been eye opening,” Ed said. “Frustration from visitors was evident. The county lot filled up by 10:30 a.m. and then people zip around and go up Broadway, but there is nowhere to park up there, so they come back down and it gets jammed up. Our goal is to grab them when the county lot fills up and send them to an available lot on the east side and the shuttle will bring them down.”

Borough Manager Maureen Sterner said further discussion would be needed to determine if the Memorial Park would be a viable site for one of the lots.

“There are no lines painted in the back portion of the lot and the athletic fields located there are a MedEvac site, so we would need to keep area clear so emergency vehicles could get in and out,” she said.

Multiple locations around the borough were considered for pickup sites for the shuttles before Humphreys zeroed in on the east side.

“We really racked our brains,” Ed said. “We talked about the Heights and picking up at Sam Miller Field, but to be honest it’s a challenge taking my equipment up there. Those hills are pretty formidable and the equipment takes a beating. I drove around a long time trying to figure this thing out and we’re hoping the plan we came up with is what works best.”